A successful meeting covering innovative technologies for cell-based Drug Discovery in Hamburg

The European ScreeningPort GmbH and ELRIG.de e.V. organise this year’s ELRIG.de Forum for the first time in northern Germany and received great response from the Life Science community.

This year’s ELRIG.de Forum, held on 19 November in Hamburg, co-organised with European ScreeningPort and supported by the North German Life Science Agency – Norgenta, achieved great success.

The event began with an opening reception and lab tour through the facilities of the European ScreeningPort, Evotec and Perkin Elmer on the evening of the 18 November. This was followed by a one day forum.

The event attracted 200 participants and 40 industrial exhibitors and sponsors, among them some of the biggest technology suppliers of the field as well as young companies offering innovative, cutting-edge products for drug discovery. Numbers exceeded expectation with double the amount of participants turning up and triple the amount of exhibitors! They all met in Hamburg to gain a comprehensive overview about the most attractive technologies applicable in Drug Discovery and to discuss ways to streamline the underlying processes.

The ELRIG.de Forum now stands as a growing landmark in the German landscape of Drug Discovery.

The increasing importance of cell based screening methods has triggered many innovations, but a real bottleneck in using cells as tools in the drug development process is still the need for standardised procedures and robust, reproducible systems capable of yielding results of appropriate quality.

The scientific program was opened by Professor Dr Günter Fuhr, Director of Fraunhofer-IBMT institute, who discussed the potential and limitations of novel, nature-derived approaches for the regeneration of differentiated tissues.

The program continued with talks on the impact of the high-throughput analysis of stem cells, the use of IT-systems, as well as the set-up of tumourbanks on the identification of disease inducing processes and their role in approaches for personalised medicine. In the last session the fact that about 62% of all drugs candidates fail in the preclinical phase, due to toxicity issues was discussed by highlighting several novel assay systems to test cytotoxic effects.

Professor Dr. Carsten Claussen, CEO of the European ScreeningPort said “We are very happy to have brought this year’s ELRIG.de Forum to Hamburg, which in turn resulted in two signed agreements around stem cell research and toxicity profiling. Additionally, we were able to demonstrate the role of the European ScreeningPort as a marketplace for innovation.”

“The significantly increased number of participants demonstrates the great interest in a German event for laboratory automation. With the ELRIG.de Forum we do want to address all people involved in this field and especially encourage technicians to actively contribute to the discussions of their area of expertise,” comments Dr. Oliver Klotzsche, who is responsible for public relations of ELRIG.de e.V., on the event.

More information can be found using: www.elrig.de

ELRIG.de:

The international LRIG is a rapidly growing special interest group focused on laboratory automation. Our membership consists of over 14,000 scientists and engineers worldwide. We have several chapters for the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. A majority of members are from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry with others from the chemical, agriculture, cosmetic, food, and specialty industries. Multiple regional meetings are held each year in which our members’ experiences in automation are presented.

The ‘German language section’ ELRIG.de e.V. is a registered public welfare association supporting sciences & education with members mainly from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

With our annual Forum, periodic workshops and group meetings we are offering an ideal platform for open minded interdisciplinary exchange of ideas between scientists, users, engineers and producers out of the entire ‘Life Science’ area. One major benefit of our group is that most of the discussions are based on years of personal experience and not published in textbooks. All scientific subjects/areas are launched by our scientific board including actual trends and problems.

To become a member, fill out the Sign-Up Form on our website www.elrig.de “Registration”.

European ScreeningPort GmbH:

European ScreeningPort is a public private partnership which offers fee-for-service small molecule screening to academic institutions.

Our goal is to provide the missing link in Europe between academic research and the Pharmaceutical industry and thereby to accelerate the translation of promising results generated in basic research into new therapeutics.

European ScreeningPort is a service provider that enables academic research institutes to access its state-of-the-art screening platform, its extensive collection of compounds as well as its sample and data processing capabilities. The inputs at European ScreeningPort are novel or under-exploited therapeutic targets with great potential, but which are unattractive to the Pharmaceutical Industry because they may lack either tractable lead series or supporting clinical Proof-of-Concept (PoC) data. Outputs range from tool compounds for mechanistic studies and PoC programs, through to high quality drug-like lead compounds suitable for progression to the pre-clinical candidates stage.

For more information please visit www.screeningport.com